Abstract
The assessment of text difficulty has played an important role in the development of the 'Elektronische tekstbegriptoets voor de brugklas', a tool for screening students in the first year of secondary education on their text comprehension skills. On the one hand, the investigation was intended to enable a well-considered selection of texts as a basis for the comprehension test. On the other hand, it provided the criteria needed to develop a reliable ability scale. A corpus was built of over a hundred texts taken from schoolbooks of different levels. The texts were analysed on three different linguistic properties: mean length of words, mean length of sentences, and coverage (percentage of words belonging to the 2000 most basic Dutch words). It was found that especially coverage is a strong indicator of text difficulty.
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